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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the sentiment but you’re only hurting yourself by choosing a worse TV at a given price point compared to just never connecting your TV to the internet.

If you want a competitive display market where the best options are still dumb then look at getting a projector. The price and quality are comparable and I really like being able to “put away” the TV by just rolling up the screen.

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I believe the Roku TVs can operate in a fully functional "dumb" mode if you don't connect them to Wifi. I'm guessing that applies to some other brands as well.

My (older) Samsung TV works the same way. I haven't seen a TV that refuses to operate without an internet connection yet.

Nah -- Rokus are really bad here, they want to run roku first then be a TV. The more traditional brands -- LGs and Samsungs of the world -- do better at this and don't bitch as much.

Some of these TVs automatically connect to any open wireless network in the area, so that isn’t always an option

If it's obvious where it is you might be able to do some percussive maintenance on the antenna

I haven't seen an open wireless network for years around my residence. Is open Wifi still a thing?

Yes, especially in more densely populated places. I can pick up a few open networks from where I’m sitting in a moderately-populated American suburb.

It can very well connect to those semi-public WiFi's that require payment or require to be a customer of that ISP (and every router from that ISP automatically broadcasts such a network in addition to the private one).

This isn't something I've seen in the wild yet (beyond anecdotal evidence which I suspect is due to a misconfiguration), however it is a very valid concern especially considering most ISPs are in bed with the media/advertising industry and would directly benefit from allowing these TVs to connect to these networks and making a deal with the manufacturer to make them do so.

That would have to either be done via the ISP gateway recognizing a MAC address or other stuff that is sniffable and potentially crackable (remember this is Samsung software we're talking about) by someone. I would assume by now if anything like that existed it'd be exploited to hell and back for a free Internet connection.

I mean I always saw this as something theoretical TV manufacturers could do but I've never seen such a TV in the wild. Can you give an example?

I've seen this mentioned in a few threads on HN and I'm curious.

Which TVs do this?

So the Sceptre 65" is $500. Where are you seeing a higher-quality 65" for $500 or less?

Any TCL or Hisense on sale is going to be better than Sceptre. Sceptres quality control is also horrendous, there was a time when one in three panels was shipping to me cracked. They make great ultra cheap monitors, but for the extra hundred or so bucks get a TCL.

You can get an LG (https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-65-class-un7000-series-led-4...) for $500, which has HDR. Did not compare these two side-by-side but generally HDR is what sells 4K TV: a small (<80") TV does not benefit from higher resolution, IMHO. HDR on the other hand, is a huge difference (and even on a regular SD signal a "smart" TV can usually blow up dynamic range with some image processing).

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